A Spiritual "Must"

Here the renown religious historian Karen Armstrong speaks about the viability ~ actually, the necessity ~ of practicing the golden rule. If we as individuals and we as nations don't practice it more frequently and deeply, our futures are uncertain, she says. And I believe her. In my own little existence, I've found the golden rule to be the greatest religious/spiritual tenet of all because it simply makes sense. This video is about 9 minutes and really worth your time!

US Belief in God Still at 90 Percent

Michaelangelo's "Conversion of St. Paul"

A new Gallup poll finds more than nine in 10 Americans continuing to believe in God. Ninety-two percent of Gallup's 1,018 respondents answered yes when asked whether they believed in God.

According to Gallup pollsters:

Despite the many changes that have rippled through American society over the last 6 ½ decades, belief in God as measured in this direct way has remained high and relatively stable. Gallup initially used this question wording in November 1944, when 96% said "yes." That percentage dropped to 94% in 1947, but increased to 98% in several Gallup surveys conducted in the 1950s and 1960s.

When asked, "Do you believe in God or a universal spirit?" 80 percent said they believed in God and 12 percent said they believed in a universal spirit. The survey did not probe into specific religious allegiances.

Belief in God drops below 90% among younger Americans, liberals, those living in the East, those with postgraduate educations, and political independents. Believing in God is nearly universal among Republicans and conservatives and, to a slightly lesser degree, in the South.

Click here for the complete article.

Extraterrestrials? What Would Jesus Do?

"Baptism of Christ," Aert de Gelder, 1710 (with saucer overhead)

In a far-reaching analysis of the potential impact on humans of learning that extraterrestrials exists, Christians likely would be scrambling to reconcile the idea of Jesus Christ with life on other planets.

“It's been argued for a couple of centuries now whether one incarnation of God as Jesus Christ for the entirety of creation is sufficient,” says theologian Ted Peters of the Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary in Berkeley, California. For instance, aliens might lead religions to question whether a second genesis of life elsewhere belongs within the biblical understanding of creation. Might Jesus Christ have appeared more than once in the universe?

According to Space.com:

To see what effects the discovery of extraterrestrial intelligence might have on religion, Peters and his colleagues surveyed more than 1,300 individuals worldwide from multiple religious traditions ~ including Roman Catholics, evangelical Protestants, mainline Protestants, Orthodox Christians, Mormons, Jews, Buddhists and non-religious groups. 

They found the vast majority of religious believers ~ regardless of religion ~ were overwhelmingly confident that they wouldn’t suffer a collapse in faith in the face of evidence of extraterrestrial intelligence. In addition, roughly one-third of religious people thought that the faith of other religions would be threatened, while two-thirds of nonreligious people thought that aliens would sway the faith of the religious as a whole. 

There are many open questions as to how people on Earth might view beliefs from space. Could advances that alien civilizations could bring be perceived much like a secular form of salvation? Might advanced civilizations and their perhaps equally advanced philosophies make our religions feel primitive?

Alien religions could draw converts, and if there are many points of agreement between religions on Earth and from space, one might see communication of ideas across species as well, Peters believes. “Greek philosophers never met the God of Moses, but there were people who said, ‘Doggone, there seems to be much that coheres,’” he added.

Click here for the Space.com article.

China Experiencing Revival of Various Religions

Worshippers of goddess Mazu recently celebrate her 1,050th birthday.

Collapsing communist ideology in China is leading to a massive religious revival, a situation of worldwide importance, considering China’s enormous population. According to NPR, in 2006 China conducted its first major survey of religious beliefs and found that 31.4 percent of about 4,500 people questioned described themselves as religious.

That amounts to more than 300 million religious believers, an astonishing number in an officially atheist country, and three times higher than the last official estimate, which had largely remained unchanged for years, according to NPR.

Across China, religious belief has far outpaced the government's ability to control the profusion of charismatic movements and revivals of traditional Chinese religions. Two-thirds of those who described themselves as religious in the 2006 survey said they were Buddhists, Taoists or worshippers of folk gods such as the Dragon King or the God of Fortune.

"It doesn't matter to the Chinese government whether you are a farmers' union, a Boy Scout troop, the Red Cross or the Catholic Church," says Sister Janet Carroll, a nun who has been active in China for decades. "If you gather people together, have authorities in place, financial means and some sort of organizational control over groups of people, the Chinese government wants to not only know about it, but also have a say about how it all functions."

To that end, after the communist revolution in 1949, the government recognized five official religions: Protestantism, Catholicism, Buddhism, Taoism and Islam. For each of them, associations were set up to supervise and monitor religious practice. 

Increasing numbers of younger people in China are practicing religion. The 2006 survey showed 62 percent of religious believers are 39 and under.

Click here for the complete NPR article.

Of Eastern Religion & Western Science

Statue of Shiva in front of the CERN scientific center near Geneva.

Mutual respect bloomed between Western science and Eastern religions throughout the 20^th century, while an unfortunate gulf continued to widen between science and Western religion due mostly to fundamentalist, literal interpretations of the Bible. Though my background was mostly Christian, I recall the thrill thirty-plus years ago of reading Fritjof Capra’s The Tao of Physics and appreciating the vital parallels he noted between what our scientists were discovering and what the Hindus, Buddhists and Taoists had been saying for millennia.

This was the topic of a brief essay last week by Philip Goldberg in The Huffington Post. I consider this to be a salient paragraph:

The interaction of Eastern spirituality and Western science has expanded methods of stress reduction, treatment of chronic disease, psychotherapy and other areas. But that is only part of the story. Hindu and Buddhist descriptions of higher stages of consciousness have expanded psychology's understanding of human development and inspired the formation of provocative new theories of consciousness itself.

Their ancient philosophies have also influenced physicists, among them Erwin Schrödinger, Werner Heisenberg and J. Robert Oppenheimer, who read from the Bhagavad Gita at a memorial service for President Franklin D. Roosevelt. In his landmark TV series Cosmos, Carl Sagan called Hinduism the only religion whose time-scale for the universe matches the billions of years documented by modern science. Sagan filmed that segment in a Hindu temple featuring a statue of the god Shiva as the cosmic dancer, an image that now stands in the plaza of the European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) in Geneva.

Click here for the complete essay.

'Be Fruitful and Multiply'

Immaculate Conception by Francisco de Solis, 1682.

Researchers are finding strong correlation between teenage birth rates and the prevalence of religious beliefs in particular states within the US. The lack of contraception ~ not the lack of abortions ~ appears to be the reason.

"Our findings by themselves do not, of course, permit causal inferences. But, if we may speculate on the most probable explanation, we conjecture that religious communities in the US are more successful in discouraging the use of contraception among their teenagers than they are in discouraging sexual intercourse itself," says Joseph Strayhorn, an adjunct faculty member with Drexel University and the University of Pittsburgh.

Researchers used data from the Pew Forum's US Religious Landscapes Survey and from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention to examine state-level effects of belief on teen birth rates.

"The magnitude of the correlation between religiosity and teen birth rate astonished us,” Strayhorn said. “Teen birth is more highly correlated with some of the religiosity items on the Religious Landscapes Survey than some of those items are correlated with each other."

The religiosity of a state was determined by averaging the percents of respondents who agreed with the eight most conservative opinions possible in the Religious Landscapes Survey, such as ‘There is only one way to interpret the teachings of my religion’ or ‘Scripture should be taken literally, word for word.’”

Click here for the ScienceDaily article.

Religious ‘Right’ Is Wrong for Many

Religious protest outside this year's Academy Awards ceremony.

Updated studies on Americans’ affiliation with organized religion continue to show a dramatic departure from churches ~ much of it provoked by increased right-wing political stances from pulpit and pews alike~ though the traditional western concept of God remains high.

Based on data compiled by sociologists Michael Hout and Claude Fischer of the University of California, ScienceDaily reports:

According to the new data, 93 percent of Americans believe in God; a figure unchanged since 1988. The group that increased was the group Hout and Fischer call "unchurched believers," those people who believe in God but report no religion. "If you think of organized religion as having two parts—the organized part and the religious part—the church-leavers' quarrel is with the organized part," said Hout, lead author of the study.

As originally reported in 2002, Hout and Fischer assert that politics continue to play a role in the increase in those reporting no religion preference. The sociologists note a parallel between the rising rates of non-religious Americans and the number of mentions of the "religious right" in press coverage in the past nearly four decades.

Political liberals and moderates are much less likely to report a religion now than in 1988; almost all political conservatives identify with a church now as they did twenty years ago.

"Invoking religion to promote a conservative social agenda may energize conservative members, but it alienates political moderates and liberals," Hout said. "The result has been a significant decrease in the fraction of American adults identifying with an organized religion."

Americans expressed stronger anti-religious feelings in 2008 than in 1998, according to the new data. Two-thirds of adults believed "religion brings more conflict than peace" in 2008 compared with just one-third in 1998.

Click here for the complete ScienceDaily article.

Does Religion Reduce Perception of Error?

(The more I think about this article, the more I feel it's open for wide interpretation. If the subject interests you, I recommend you follow the link to the complete article for more details.)

A team of researchers recently took a close look at a small area of the brain called the anterior cingulated cortex, or ACC. According to research leader Michael Inzlicht, the ACC tells us when something is wrong, as when we've made a mistake.

"When it's fired, the response engendered is 'uh-oh, pay attention, something is amiss here'," says Inzlicht, a neuroscientist at the University of Toronto.

• Among his findings are that people of a religious persuasion have less of an ACC ‘uh-oh’ response than non-religious types when they make an error on a simple test.

• On the other hand, people with known anxiety disorders tend to show high activity in the ACC when they make a mistake.

One explanation is that people with a genetic predisposition to reduced ACC activity gravitate toward religion. "It's possible that if you're born with a certain kind of brain, you're predisposed to religion," Inzlicht says. A recent article in New Scientist adds:

However, Inzlicht suspects that religious belief is driving the association. In unpublished experiments, Inzlicht's team asked religious volunteers to describe in writing either their faith or their favourite season. Those who wrote about their connection to God exhibited reduced ACC activation, compared with people who described the weather.

Inzlicht says it would be interesting to test people as their religious devotion strengthens or weakens over time to see if ACC activation changes accordingly. This could help confirm the correct explanation for the lower ACC activity.

"It's a very provocative finding and it is consistent with a lot of other things we know about religion" says Ara Norenzayan, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. This might explain why religious belief seems to blunt feelings of anxiety.

Inzlicht's team tested 50 university students from diverse religious and cultural backgrounds. Christians made up most participants, but his team also tested Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists and atheists.

Click here for the complete New Scientist article.

Greater Self-Control Linked to Religious Beliefs

"But Daniel purposed in his heart that he would not defile himself with the portion of the king's delicacies, nor with the wine which he drank; therefore he requested of the chief of the eunuchs that he might not defile himself." Daniel 1:8


In Science’s ongoing (and in my humble opinion, often fruitless) attempts to understand and to quantify “Religion,” we now have a new study linking religious behavior with self-control.

The study recently was conducted by University of Miami psychology professor Michael McCullough and concludes that religious people have more self-control than do their less religious counterparts. According to ScienceDaily:

These findings imply that religious people may be better at pursuing and achieving long-term goals that are important to them and their religious groups. This, in turn, might help explain why religious people tend to have lower rates of substance abuse, better school achievement, less delinquency, better health behaviors, less depression, and longer lives.

In this research project, McCullough evaluated eight decades worth of research on religion, which has been conducted in diverse samples of people from around the world. He found persuasive evidence from a variety of domains within the social sciences, including neuroscience, economics, psychology, and sociology, that religious beliefs and religious behaviors are capable of encouraging people to exercise self-control and to more effectively regulate their emotions and behaviors, so that they can pursue valued goals.

"The importance of self-control and self-regulation for understanding human behavior are well known to social scientists, but the possibility that the links of religiosity to self-control might explain the links of religiosity to health and behavior has not received much explicit attention," McCullough told ScienceDaily. "We hope our paper will correct this oversight in the scientific literature."

"Sacred" Goals Get More Energy

Among the conclusions the research team drew were:

• Religious rituals such as prayer and meditation affect the parts of the human brain that are most important for self-regulation and self-control;

• When people view their goals as "sacred," they put more energy and effort into pursuing those goals, and therefore, are probably more effective at attaining them;

• Religious lifestyles may contribute to self-control by providing people with clear standards for their behavior, by causing people to monitor their own behavior more closely, and by giving people the sense that God is watching their behavior;

• The fact that religious people tend to be higher in self-control helps explain why religious people are less likely to misuse drugs and alcohol and experience problems with crime and delinquency.

"By thinking of religion as a social force that provides people with resources for controlling their impulses (including the impulse for self-preservation, in some cases) in the service of higher goals, religion can motivate people to do just about anything," McCullough said.

Click here for the ScienceDaily article.

'Spirituality' Linked to Children's Happiness

A recent study correlating children’s happiness and spirituality ~ apparently at the expense of more conventional religion ~ is getting a fair share of press. But there’s a lot of hair-splitting going on in the articles, and perhaps in the study itself.

It appears “religion” is equated with “organized religion,” in other words, conventional denominations and regular attendance. “Spirituality,” however, is defined as “meaning and value in one’s own life.”

According to an article in LiveScience:

Personal aspects of spirituality (meaning and value in one's own life) and communal aspects (quality and depth of inter-personal relationships) were both strong predictors of children's happiness, said study leader Mark Holder from the University of British Columbia in Canada and his colleagues Ben Coleman and Judi Wallace.

However, religious practices were found to have little effect on children's happiness, Holder said. Religion is just one institutionalized venue for the practice of or experience of spirituality, and some people say they are spiritual but are less enthusiastic about the concept of God. Other research has shown a connection between well-adjusted and well-behaved children and religion, but that is not the same, necessarily, as happiness.

A child's temperament was also an important predictor of happiness, according to LiveScience. Happier children were more sociable and less shy. The relationship between spirituality and happiness remained strong, even when the authors took temperament into account.

Somewhat counterintuitively, religious practices — including attending church, praying and meditating — had little effect on a child's happiness.

"Enhancing personal meaning may be a key factor in the relation between spirituality and happiness," the researchers stated. Strategies aimed at increasing personal meaning in children ~ such as expressing kindness towards others and recording these acts of kindness, as well as acts of altruism and volunteering ~ may help to make children happier, Holder suggests.

Click here for the complete LiveScience article.

Depression/Religion Link Puzzles Researchers

Old Woman at Prayer, by Dutch master Nicholaes Maes, 1656.

In an unexpected twist, a study evaluating health matters in relation to religious activity found that people with higher levels of “religious well-being” also had higher levels of depression.

Then the researchers realized the puzzling finding was likely related to the fact that depressed people often cling tighter to religion, relating more often to God and praying more often than less depressed people.

The study ~ conducted by Harvard and Brown University medical schools as well as the National Institutes of Mental Health and the Society for the Scientific Study of Religion ~ characterized the religiosity of 918 study participants in terms of three domains of religiosity:

• Religious service attendance, referring to being involved with a church.
• Religious well-being, referring to the quality of a person's relationship with a higher power.
• Existential well-being, referring to a person's sense of meaning and their purpose in life.

Researchers were surprised to find that the group with higher levels of religious well-being were 1.5 times more likely to have had depression than those with lower levels of religious well-being.

Researchers also theorize this is because people with depression tend to use religion as a coping mechanism. As a result, they're more closely relating to God and praying more.

"People with high levels of existential well-being tend to have a good base, which makes them very centered emotionally," lead researcher Joanna Maselko told Science Daily. "People who don't have those things are at greater risk for depression, and those same people might also turn to religion to cope."

Maselko admits that researchers have yet to determine which comes first for the depressed people: the depression or being religious.

Click here for the Science Daily article.